Past Tints

Paulina Del Valle, the matriarch of a transplanted Chilean family, is an “astute bewigged Amazon with a gluttonous appetite.” Under her orders, a coachman is parading a behemoth, elaborately carved Florentine bed through the streets of nineteenth-century San Francisco. He stops and rests the ruby-canopied bed beneath the balcony of Del Valle’s husband’s concubine and rings a tiny bell twice before continuing on to Del Valle’s home.

So begins Isabel Allende‘s Portrait in Sepia. The novel’s narrator, Aurora Del Valle, recounts her grandmother’s fleeting moment of glory second-hand; years later, the old woman explained that her “triumph lasted about a minute.” Instead of making a laughingstock of her amorous husband, the incident brought shame on her. In the late 1800s, she told Aurora, “San Francisco was a hornet’s nest of corrupt politicians, bandits, and loose women.”

As in all of Allende’s novels, Portrait in Sepia‘s ordinary objects are endowed with mysterious powers, and the lives of her mysterious characters play out in rich, exotic landscapes rife with political discord, corruption and war.

“People who like minimalist literature shouldn’t read my books,” Allende says. “In my books, there’s so much going on. There are passions and revenge and blood, politics, social issues and feminism. Everything is exaggerated. I like strong characters and complicated plots. That’s what I love.”

In Portrait, the domineering Paulina whisks Aurora away to Chile. There, Aurora becomes nearly obsessed with trying to demystify the early years of her life in San Francisco’s Chinatown — a life her grandmother wants to wrap in secrecy.

“The theme of Portrait in Sepia is memory,” says Allende. “The first few years of this girl’s life are erased. She doesn’t remember anything; she just has terrible nightmares. And all her life is about trying to find out what happened and who she really is.”

Allende could just as easily be speaking of her own childhood. Allende’s father abandoned her family when she was young, and she was shipped off to live with a grandfather and a clairvoyant grandmother (who later became the model for the supernatural Clara Del Valle, who appears in several of Allende’s books). Forbidden from speaking about her father, Allende has spent the rest of her life trying to piece together an image of him.

Allende’s mother remarried. The young girl’s stepfather was a diplomat, and Allende lived in war-torn countries all over the world (including Lebanon in the 1950s). Eventually her stepfather sent her back to Chile, where her uncle, Salvador Allende, was president. Allende witnessed the bloody military coup in which he was overthrown.

“I think that I have planted my roots in my memory and in my books,” Allende says. “I don’t have a place anymore. I belong in many places or in no place at all. I guess I’m trying to create a place of my own, a sort of invented country that is my literary geographic place.”

In addition to being part of Allende’s quest to shape her own identity, Portrait in Sepia is a way for Allende to bring back characters from her last novel, Daughter of Fortune. With Daughter and her earlier book House of the Spirits, Portrait in Sepia completes an out-of-sequence trilogy.